ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN (1958)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

Everyone knows, or thinks that they know, about Nathan Juran’s 1958 ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN. Though the film wasn’t the last of the “giant menace” films of the 1950s, the title alone has been used for very specific parodies (as opposed to generic parodies with names like “the Thing That Ate Cincinnati”). One particular movie-poster, showing the gigantic bikini-clad woman looming over a turnpike, has been recycled by pop culture far more than most movie-posters of the era, certainly more than ATTACK’s spiritual predecessor THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957). ATTACK’s final ten minutes is often all that most people remember about the flick: the sequence in which a spurned wife turned into a giantess rampages into a small California town looking for her cheating husband and his mistress. For good measure, ATTACK’s superimposition-FX, used to create the titular giantess, were so poorly done that director Juran cited those dodgy effects as the reason he used a false name, Nathan Hertz, on the film’s release.

At best, ATTACK is celebrated as a “trash classic,” if only for its one iconic image. I won’t try to claim it deserves a much higher status: that it can measure up (so to speak) to a genre-classic like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (also 1957). But there are some aspects of ATTACK that deserve more attention.

Immediately before Mark Hanna wrote ATTACK, he also penned THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, which was an original script, unlike the novel-derived SHRINKING MAN. COLOSSAL MAN, though, does not have any of SHRINKING MAN’s naturalistic dialogue or characterization, but depends largely on stock formula character-types. Hanna’s conceptual follow-up to COLOSSAL MAN, though, is closer in tone to that of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, in which the main character’s SF-mutation is made a vehicle to describe that character’s psychological weaknesses.

 In addition, ATTACK has a much more sordid, downbeat quality to its species of melodrama than the majority of fifties “creature features.” The story of Nancy Archer, an heiress with psychological baggage and a husband whom she calls a “gigolo,” resembles other SF-films of the time than the same period’s premiere anthology-serials: ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. From 1955 to 1965, the show constantly featured tales of misplaced love and the illicit desire for filthy lucre, possibly playing to the national tastes exemplified by the lurid paperbacks of the postwar era.

ATTACK begins with Nancy, our poor little rich girl, fleeing her small California town in her car, drag-racing into the desert out of pique at her husband Harry. Juran establishes that Nancy didn’t exactly catch Harry cheating: he was merely making eyes at a local bar-girl, Honey Parker (a name loosely reminiscent of Nancy’s own). Nancy’s rapid exit, in fact, gives the audience the chance to see what a rotter Harry is. Once Nancy’s gone, he and Honey get as hot-and-heavy as anyone can in a public place. Harry makes clear that he only married Nancy for her money, and Honey suggests that, thanks to Nancy’s past history of drinking and psychological tests, she's a prime candidate for the “booby hatch.”

What happens to Nancy out in the desert seems made to order for Honey and Harry. A white sphere, always described as a “satellite” rather than a spaceship, lands in front of Nancy’s car, which immediately stalls out. Nancy then meets the pilot of the ship, a giant male who doesn’t seem to wearing many, if any, clothes. He reaches for Nancy, though like Harry what he really wants is her money, or rather, its objective correlative in the form of her diamond necklace. Nancy flees her Close Encounter of the Kong Kind, hotfooting it back to the town.

Local sheriff Dubbitt and his goofy deputy Charlie don’t belief Nancy's story about the big white satellite and its occupant, but they do think the rich lady might’ve encountered some avaricious drifter after that fabulous diamond, which could “tempt the devil himself.” When Harry hears about the story, he hurries to Nancy’s ritzy estate, to console his poor wife and to learn if she’s ripe for the funny farm.

Scripter Hanna never says much about the source of Nancy’s wealth. Since she doesn’t work, it’s probable that her riches are a paternal bequest, given that women couldn’t be CEOs in those days. Apparently both of Nancy’s parents are deceased, though there’s an old butler, Jess, who seems like a father-substitute, since he genuinely cares for Nancy and “has known her since she was a little girl.” Harry and Jess clearly don’t like each other, and one of Harry’s first sardonic remarks is to suggest that maybe he ought to be the butler and Jess ought to be her husband. Since Harry feels no jealousy of Nancy, Harry’s sarcasm may reflect his consciousness of his status in terms of social class, though to be sure Hanna also never tells us what Harry was doing before he latched on to his current meal ticket. The first conversation between the couple establishes that Nancy did try to kick her Harry-habit at one point, but she called him back to her because she’s madly in love with his worthless hide. (A later sequence establishes that another male confidante, Nancy’s family doctor, rather unwisely advised Nancy to mend fences with her hubby.) Harry doesn’t believe the story about the giant alien, but he plays a waiting game, hoping Nancy will condemn herself out of her own mouth.

He doesn’t have long to wait. Nancy obsesses about the fact that no one believes her,  and she’s especially set off when she hears—or imagines that she hears—a local newscaster relaying other observations of the “satellite.”  But he makes a joke of Nancy’s alleged sighting, speaking as if “the man in the moon” is another suitor for the rich lady. That night Nancy forces Harry to drive her into the desert, looking for the elusive white spacecraft. Harry, hoping for more evidence against his nutty wife, gets the shock of his life when they find both the ship and the alien. This time the giant accosts Nancy, still wanting her shiny bauble. Harry drives madly away, so freaked out by the encounter that he’s not even concerned with her fate or how it might benefit him. He stops at the estate only to grab some of his clothes, intending to flee for parts unknown. Jess tries to interrogate him and the two men fight. Harry wins but because he takes time to stop in town to pick up Honey, the law overtakes him.

However, the lawmen don’t have to go looking for Nancy. The next day she’s found atop the roof of her house, with strange scratches on her throat, no necklace, and her body full of radiation. The broad implication is that the giant returned her home after taking her necklace.  But since he never speaks or indicates any telepathic powers, the film never tells the audience how he knew where her house was (unless he has a mind-reading machine aboard his ship).

While the doctors cluck about how to treat the irradiated heiress, Harry and Honey recover their low-class priorities, and Honey suggests that Harry use the treatment as a pretext to shoot Nancy up with the wrong kind of medicine. Before he can do so, the still unconscious Nancy manifests her new kinship with her alien rendezvous: growing to a titanic size, though apparently still not quite fifty feet yet. One might think that after such an unsettling experience, Harry would renew his desire to let the devil take the hindmost. Instead, after failing to murder Nancy, he simply retreats to the bar and goes back to hanging with Honey—thus setting up the movie’s final scene.

Before that happens, the script allows the audience to find out what’s going on with the alien giant. Jess and the sheriff belatedly notice the really big footprints that the giant left from dropping off Nancy. The two of them track their owner all the way to his satellite. The humans enter the sphere and observe that the giant’s ship runs on diamonds, including the one taken from Nancy. Before they can emulate the hero of  “Jack and the Beanstalk” and re-steal the necklace, the giant shows up. The humans escape the ship, and the giant, now wearing gladiator-like clothes, follows them. Gunfire doesn’t affect the alien, though he is staggered slightly when the sheriff hits him with a grenade. The extraterrestrial vents his wrath by smashing the sheriff’s car, gets back in his ship, and takes his leave of Planet Earth.

As soon as the visitor leaves, Nancy wakes up, clothes herself in bed-sheets, and goes looking for her cheating hubby. One never knows if she even remembers her experience with the giant, but maybe she picks up some of his hypothetical telepathy, given that she’s immediately certain that Harry’s with her rival. Long story short: the despicable plotters get themselves snuffed, but the terminally unhappy heiress doesn’t fare any better (even though her metamorphosis lets her live the rest of her life as an “atomic blonde.”)

The main attraction of the iconic end-scene is that it plays like a science-fiction send-up of an old trope: the aggrieved wife hauling her mate out of the local gin-mill. Yet, to be sure, Nancy is no beleaguered hausfrau, and there’s no evidence that she cares about anyone beyond her amour fou toward Harry. And though a fifty-foot woman can’t help but take on some of the aspect of frustrated femininity, it’s significant that Honey, Nancy’s “other self,” may be of a threat to Nancy than Harry is, since Honey’s the one who comes up with ways to get rid of Nancy, either consigning her to the nuthouse or to death. At the core of ATTACK, then, is a story that neither cheesy effects nor corny jokes  can overshadow: a story of Doomed Love akin to all those articulated both by elitist entertainers like Alfred Hitchcock and by cheap paperbacks of sordid melodrama. And it seems doomed, not just because of the class-war between Nancy and Harry (or maybe between Harry and Nancy’s dead father), but because no one in the story *knows * himself or herself—except, apparently, the enigmatic giant from the big white spheroid.

(I note in passing the perhaps accidental use of vampire-imagery in ATTACK: the fact that Nancy is infected because of  “scratches on her neck.” But the appearance of this motif may be mere coincidence, on the same level as the possible influence of “Jack and the Beanstalk.’)